Today we are releasing our third round of plugins, which will add support for a project blog, tagging, and the ability to create new ticket fields. This completes our month of new plugins, and we see that already many of you are taking advantage of the new features. If there is a Trac plugin you would like to use that we don't yet support, just let us know, and we will add it to our list for a future release.

Project Blog

Keep your clients or co-workers up-to-date with a project blog. This plugin adds support for blog posts with comments, along with various ways to browse your archive of posts. You can also add attachments to your posts, and use macros to add blog information to your wiki pages.

Tags

This plugin allows you to categorize all your tickets, wiki pages, blog entries, and forums by tagging them. Don't want to enter tags for all your old tickets? Don't worry, this plugin will automatically take the Keywords field from tickets (and the Category field from blog posts) and turn them into tags. It also adds a new Tags tab in Trac with a tag cloud that lets you browse your tagged items.

Custom Ticket Fields

We know from your feedback that many of you would like to add custom fields to your tickets, and this plugin will let you do just that. Fields may use one of a number of input methods, including textboxes, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdown lists, and textareas.

This week we are adding support for a second batch of plugins, including the oft-requested Workflow Editor. We expect these plugins will increase the productivity of many of our customers. Be on the lookout for our third round of plugins, coming next week.

Workflow Editor

This plugin adds a Workflow tab to the Admin section of Trac which allows you to modify ticket workflows. It lets you change the default list of statuses (new, assigned, accepted, reopened, and closed) to allow a ticket to be in other states. It also lets you define new actions that can move the ticket from one status to another. For example, if you wanted to add a step to your workflow where the QA department gets a chance to test a resolved ticket before it is closed, you could add a new status called "testing" and change the "resolve" action to move the ticket to this status. Then you would create two new actions, "pass" and "fail", which would move the ticket from the "testing" status to the "closed" or "reopened" status, respectively.

Ticket Importer

If you've ever needed to import tickets from a source other than Trac, this plugin can save you a lot of time and effort. Simply upload an Excel or CSV file with one ticket per row, and this plugin will import them for you. You can even update existing tickets this way, by downloading your current tickets in CSV format, making the necessary changes, and then importing the file.

Markdown Support

If you're coming to Trac from a system that used Markdown for its formatting syntax, this plugin may come in handy. It allows you to enter Markdown-formatted text in wiki pages. You could use this if you're more comfortable using Markdown syntax, or if you need to import some pages that are formatted with Markdown.

After our upgrade to Trac 0.12 in January, we decided it was time to add support for some more Trac plugins. We have been tracking the plugin requests that our customers have been making, and have determined a number of plugins that we believe will be useful for many of our customers. Today we have launched the first batch of new plugins. Our plan is to release a couple more batches of plugins over the next few weeks.

Discussion Forums

This plugin adds a "Forums" tab to Trac that lets you manage a set of discussion forums. You can use Trac permissions to determine who can post to forums, and you can also set a list of moderators. Forums may also be placed into groups to help keep things organized. Users may subscribe to Forums or Topics and then receive email updates for them. This is a great way to collaborate as a team or to build a community around your project.

Batch Modify Tickets

Have you ever needed to make the same change to a dozen tickets? It can get pretty tedious. Now you can simply enable this plugin and make all your changes in one operation. Maybe you need to close a bunch of tickets or assign them to another milestone. Simply go to the "View Tickets" tab and click on "Custom Query" in the top-right corner of the page. This will let you construct a query that will match the tickets you would like to change. Then click to expand the "Batch Modify" box at the bottom of the page, which allows you to make the changes to the tickets.

Spam Blocker

If you've opened your Trac projects up so that anonymous users can post tickets, you may have run into problems with spam. Enabling this plugin will help avoid this situation by placing a captcha on the New Ticket page for any users that don't have the CAPTCHA_SKIP Trac permission. We use the popular reCAPTCHA as our captcha of choice. Note that you will most likely want to place the CAPTCHA_SKIP permission on the "authenticated" group, so that only anonymous users can see the captcha.

Time is money. But how much money? To answer that question, you have to be able to track your work time, and we decided to add some plugins to help you do just that. The popular Timing and Estimation plugin allows you to track both the estimated and actual time worked on a ticket, and it includes a number of time reports that readily summarize the work done by your team. It even has a nice feature that lets you "clock in" when you start working on a ticket.

We have also added three more plugins based on your feedback. The Custom Roadmap plugin allows you to divide up the roadmap progress bars into additional categories. The Wiki Backlinks macro lets you add a list of backlinks to a wiki page. Finally, the Wysiwyg plugin provides a wysiwyg editor as an option when editing wiki pages. These plugins are all available from the Plugins tab on the Project Settings page.

Have a happy New Year from the Repository Hosting Team. We look forward to continue serving you in 2010!

It has been a while, so thanks for your patience. We found out that many of you are Agile software developers and today we are launching a new feature just for you. We have integrated the Agilo plugin into Trac and it is now available in every Repository Hosting account. We have also added a few additional plugins to make using Repository Hosting friendlier.

Why Agile Software Development?

In 2001 a group of well-known software developers wrote the Agile Manifesto to protest the inefficient and unrealistic practices that were common in the almost ubiquitous waterfall model of software development. Agile methods recognize that projects are unpredictable and that there is often a disconnect between the developers and the customers. It focuses on people and working software over processes and planning. Software is developed iteratively, in short 1 to 2 week sprints, at the end of which the team delivers working software that can be shown to the customer for feedback. So why Agile software development? It forces you and your team to deliver working software in small increments, allowing you to skip a lot of the tedious and time-consuming project planning, instead adjusting your plan as you go.

There is nothing worse than spending 4 months developing an extremely complex piece of software (which you are very proud of), only to find out it wasn't exactly what the customer wanted. I know this firsthand, as I have had to throw away lots of code and have wasted many hours in the past, until I was introduced to the agile way of thinking.

For those of you who have never used agile methods, it's easy to start by using the Agilo plugin.

Agilo

Agilo is a Trac plugin developed by agile42 and is available on the new Plugins tab on your Project Settings page. It provides you with all the necessary tools for Agile programming, including defining teams, creating requirements, user stories, tasks, and bugs, a product backlog, sprint backlog, and burndown chart. Full documentation can be found here.

You will also notice that we've improved the theme and styles of Trac. These changes were inspired by the excellent theme that comes with Agilo.

Additional Plugins

In addition to Agilo, we have also added three other plugins for you to use. The Download Releases plugin provides you with a Downloads tab in Trac where you can post releases of your software for others to download. The Ticket Deletions plugin allows you to permanently delete tickets (as opposed to merely closing them). This is useful in case you get spam tickets added to your project. Finally, the Table of Contents macro allows you to create customized TOCs for your pages. Please check the Plugins tab for more details.

If you have any feedback on these new features, or if there is a Trac plugin you would like to see added, please send us a quick email and let us know at support@repositoryhosting.com. Remember, at Repository Hosting there is only One Plan, One Price no matter how many new features we add.

Enjoy your new agile tools!